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AN 



ADDRESS 



DELIVERED BEFORE THE 



CONCORD FEMALE ANTI-SLAVERY SOCIETY, 



AT ITS ANNUAL MEETING 



25 DEC. 1837. 



BY NATHANIEL P. ROGERS. 



TO WHICH IS ADDED, 



THE THIRD ANNUAL REPORT 



OF SAID SOCIETY. 



CONCORD, N. H. 

WILLIAM WHITE, PRINTER. 

1838. 



'I £H O'k 



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A/ 



ADDRESS. 



This anniversary of your Association, formed to aid in the 
overthrow of Slavery, and the disenthralment of your fettered 
countrymen, soems happily to fall on the birth-day of Him who 
came " to preach deliverance to the captives — and to set at lib- 
erty them that aie bruised."' 

And think it not strange, my respected friends, that with 
objects and purposes such as engaged the preacher at Nazareth, 
you should encounter persecution — that the wealth and the 
standing, the loftiness and the fashion should cast you out of 
the pale of its regard and acknowledgment ; that you should be 
regarded as vulgar enthusiasts — that the judicious and prudent 
ones, with whom principle is abstraction — whose path of duty 
is what they term " expediency" — a reputable thrifty conform- 
ity with the world — that these should toss the head and curl the 
Up of impatient scorn at your low enterprise, and give you place 
even down among those outcast ones, whose cause you are 
nobly espousing. Think it scarcely strange that you should be 
literally mobbed in this day, women as you are, although the 
Marys and the Marthas, who " left their sphere" to follow the 
" emissary" at Nazareth, who attended him at the crucifixion, 
amid scenes that made the manly heart of Peter quail in denial 
of his Lord — who mingled unattended in the throngs of the 
soldiery, amid the tramping of the horsemen and the terrors of 
the centurions, to sustain by their ati'cctionate and sympathetic 
presence, their suffering Saviour — these women were never 
mobbed or molested, even by those rude and callous-hearted 
men who could crucify the Son of God. But our age is in ad- 
vance of theirs. " Public sentiment" now stoops to no distinc- 
tion of sex — men are not now its exclusive objects — and its 
movements are not confined to the rough and ruffian classes of 
community. Women are its legitimate subjects, and gentlemen 
obey its high impulses. " Gentlemen of standing," and (what 
is more) of what gives standing — " gentlemen of Property" — 
city gentlemen, bred to the lofty refinements of your Pilgrim 
emporium, and within the humanizing influences of the chief 
seats ol letters and the school of the Prophets — "gentlemen in 
broad cloth and broad day," can so far stray from their sphere, 
as to fall upon a little band of their defenceless countrywomen, 
' assembled in an upper roonj" f*n- prayer, and manfully rout 



them from their devotions. Surely the days of chivalry arc not 
clean gone. Think it nothing strange, that " public opinion," 
braved as it is by rash and misguided fanaticism — in its zeal for 
Union with the secedmg South, should depart from the respect 
once paid to the gentler sex and extend to you the courtesies of 
the mob. 

It is the doctrine of the pulpit and the press in this day, that 
the victims of mob violence are its guilty and responsible excit- 
ers. That popular violence is to be sure unjustifiable, but that 
it is unjustifiable also to provoke it, by going too fast and far in 
ad^^ance of popular sentiment, and that along with the mob is 
io be ranked the rash promulgator of truth, which the commu- 
nity is not yet ready to receive, and they are called from the 
New-England pulpit and the New-England press, the two great 
enemies of their country. The Lord Jesus Christ himself was 
mobbed. In the earliest exercise of his divine " agency," when 
he returned from the temptations to expediency in the wilder- 
ness, in the power of the Spirit, and came to lecture at Nazareth, 
wjiere he had been brought up, and declared the tulfilmentof 
pcophecy in his ad vent and preaching — his wise and respectable 
auditory " rose upon him, filled with wrath — thrust him out of 
their city — led him to the brow of the hill whereon their city 
was built, that they might cast him down headlong." What 
excited this fury ? " Harsh language" and an ^'unchristian spir- 
itV They thought so. Will our authorities say so? Will 
they charge upon the Son of God the guilt of that excitement ? 
I make no irreverent comparisons or unscriptural illustrations. 
I am speaking of the doctrine of the day, that those who en- 
counter mob violence, by advancing truths against popular opin- 
ion, are guilty of that violence. Was the Lord Jesus Christ, I 
ask, the guilty instigator of the Nazareth mob, that dragged 
him from the synagogue, as your former townsman and minister 
George Storrs was dragged from the pulpit in a neighboring 
Nazareth? Start not at this bold use of Scripture names. — 
There is nothing sacred in the names of towns in Holy land. 
PiTTSFiELD — NoRTHFiEi.T) are as religious and reverend as 
Nazareth, and Boston or Alton, as Jerusalem. Was that mob 
at Nazareth got up by the victim of it? Would Reverend 
Hubbard Winslow dare say so, in Bowdoin street pulpit, in a 
thanksgiving sermon ? — or his Honorable coadjutor, the bloody- 
ininded James T. Austin in Fanueil Hall, in a solemn meeting 
held in observance of the martyrdom of a minister of Christ and 
the fall of Liberty ! Oh no ! God forbid ! The wicked peo- 
ple were the authors of that mob. That was a different affair — ■ 
a long time ago and the preacher was the Messiah, and it was no 
excuse or palliation that he excited fury by going in advance of 
the age and braving enlightened public opinion. But this Lovejoy 
and these George Storrses, who are they, that they should agi- 



talc tlic i>ublic. disturh tlic peace and divide the eliurclies, and 
then ciaiin the example ol" the I>.ord ? iMy friends, what was 
there in the i>erson of that preacher, his maimer or ap|)earance, 
that should have led them, or would lead those of our time, to 
confess or receive him, or the truths lie preached : lie told 
them only plain truth, and in a plain way. It was abstract truth, 
and a good deal in advance of the times, and who was he, that 
Ihey should receive it of him? Was he the risen and glorified 
Messiah ? Had they been astoiiished and awe-struck, as we 
Jiave been, at the record of his miracles — his walking on the 
sea — silencing its voice of waves — darkening the land at mid- 
day, and at last rising from the dead and ascending to heaven ? 
No. He was the low-bred, stable-born, coarse-clad, hard-handed 
carpenter of Nazareth — who had to work for his living — and 
no doubt, work out by the day. He was of no family. He 
had no "jiroperty'' — no -'standing," in the vulgar little village 
where he had been brought up. They all knew him, and his 
father before him, and his sisters, were they not all with them ? 
— and who was he, that he should set up to teach ! He was 
not one of the " great, leading and statesman-like minds of the 
day," — who, as the Boston press exclaimed, when terrified at 
the rumor from Alton, '"must take up this question and deter- 
mine wheliier slavery must longer be tolerated in this country." 
I need not declare what would be the reception, or the fate of 
such a messenger as he appeared to be, were he now to revisit 
the earth, and preach, in our synagogues, -• deliverance to the 
captive." He came, he declared, to "' preach deliverance to the 
captive — to heal the broken-hearted — to proclaim the Gospel to 
the poor, and to set at liberty them that are bruised." Now I 
ask this assembly, who on earth, in the Saviour's day, or in any 
other day. were ever in a captivity like that of our American 
slave ? Who were •'• the poor," whose poverty was utter desti- 
tution, like his? Whose heart was broken, crushed, extin- 
guished rather, like his — and who was ever " bruised,'' as our 
southern slave brotlier, in soul and spirit, as well as in his lacer- 
ated and dishonored body ! Who, since man fell and violence 
began in the earth, was ever led captive, poverty-consumed, 
heart-scathed and withered, bruised, trampled and ground to 
powder as he is ! No one — no one. 

Consider his captivity, if we can apprehend it now, after ages 
of acquiescence in it, and callousing and stupifying assent to it, 
and guilty [)articipation in it. It is a captivity from which there 
is no rinsom. no deliverance; and to whieh there is no period. 
Its fetters bind down '' the spirit of a man," which would '' sus- 
tain tiie infirmity"' of other bondage. Its imprisonment is not 
by walls and bars. Bursting locks and tligging down barriers 
promise no escape. It manacles the sj>irit and sends out the 
animal bodv to wander about like the dog after the heels of his 



master, or his master's horse. It is fenced about, not by pick- 
eted walls, that possibility might scale — but by a remorseless, 
merciless human brotherhood, that denies him refuge, and for- 
bids him all approach — that flanks him with " cold obstruction" 
and bars him on every hand with a repulsion as insurmountable 
as the gulf which fixed the rich man from Lazarus. Whose 
wide native country has for him not a city or a nook ot refuge ; 
in whose distant and dubious and despairing flight to unknown 
Canada, not a freeman is free along the land of liberty togive 
him a cup of cold water, or bid him God speed. Who lays no 
claim to human sympathy — whom our civilization has taught 
even the Indian to abhor — for whom, in the heart of man, God 
seems to have made no provision. He cannot implore his fel- 
low man — he cannot petition him. He cannot be allowed peti- 
tioners in his forlorn behalf. The ox may low for his fodder, 
and the famished dog howl at the gate of man — but the Amer- 
ican slave may not dare complain or sigh in his bondage. Aye, 
he may not be discontent. Was ever captive like this captive ! 
Oh yes, there has always been slavery. It existed among the 
Jews, in the days of the Patriarchs, of the Saviour and of the 
Apostles, and with the other political institutions of the times, 
it passed unreproved and unregarded. This, my friends, I am 
bold to deny. That there has been captivity and subjugation 
and bondage, I admit ; but never utter slavery till now. Joseph 
was a bondman. His brethren sold him for a servant, and he 
was bought by a master, in a strange land. But was he doomed 
to toil on the plantations of the Nile unpaid, and driven by the 
whip like a beast of burden, and reckoned out from human kind ? 
The circumstances of his captivity resemble more nearly the 
kidnapping and enslavement of our ancestral slaves, than any 
other in scripture history — but what was his slavery ? " He was 
a prosperous man, and he was in the house of his master the 
Egyptian, and he served him, and Potiphar made him overseer 
(not of his slaves, but) of his house, and put into his hand all 
that he had, and he left all that he had in Joseph's hand, and 
knew not aught he had, save the bread which he did eat." And 
when falsely accused to his proud and warrior lord, and his 
wrath kindled against him to the utmost fierceness, what was 
the fate of the presumptuous slave ? Was plantation justice 
administered to him ? Was he taken to the wood-pile and his 
head chopped off — burnt alive — chopped up from loot to head 
and lectured upon, as the boy of Lilburn Lewis was, whose 
feet had dared to run away ? Was Potipliar's task-master order- 
ed to scourge the life out of him with the slave-whip ? No, liis 
master " took him and put him in prison, where the king's pri- 
soners were bound, and he was there in the prison. And the 
keeper of the i)rison committed to his hand all the prisoners 
that were in the j)rison. The keeper of the prison looked not 



to any thing that was under his hand,'' &c. Would Colonel 
McDuffie, or General Hamilton, or Governor Calhoun, or any ot 
the Potiphars of the South, have so disposed of the house- 
servant who should thus awaken their vengeance ? Would the 
wretch hve an hour ? Would he he arrested and imprisoned 
among the white ofTenders — among " the king's prisoners?" 
Not even his high price for the south-western market would 
save him from the most unceremonious vengeance, and no more 
inquiry would be made for his blood, than if a dog had been 
slain. Universal sentiment would synn)athize with the chival- 
rous master, and applaud the honorable deed. Joseph in the 
servic e of Potiphar or in the prison was no more like the Amer- 
ican slave, than when he stood before Pharaoii interpreting his 
dreams, or dispensed the corn in the years of famine. And 
so of all the other bond service the world has ever known. 
There has been tyranny and oppression and cruelty — but never 
such a wanton, insulting, mocking, annihilating slavery as ours. 
There never was Republican and Christian Mastery before 
this of ours, and never, therefore, could have been such slavery. 
There never before were " Liberty and Equality^' slaveholders, 
and never " land of Liberty^'' slaves. West Indian slavery 
resembled ours in the color of its original victims, and the want 
of color in its tyrants, and it stole them from the same Africa 
with us — but it never could compete with ours in Republican 
and Christian Horrors. Monarchy and despotism need not, 
cannot enslave like the Free and Equal Republic. Repub- 
licanism must leave nothing in the slave, to which its broad, 
boundless doctrines ol Liberty might attach. It must reduce 
him below reach of its " self-evident truths." It must blot out 
his personality. He must be stripped and shorn and bereaved, 
till he becomes an exception to universal rules, which know no 
exceptions. No mastery before ours ever was obliged to do all 
this, and never has done it. Russian bondage, Algerine bond- 
age, Turkish bondage, West Indian slavery, fall as far in the 
rear of ours, as their mastery does in its professions ol Liberty 
and Justice. We are the only peojjle that ever professed or had 
a chance to be free, and the only people tliat ever held genuine, 
unalloyed slaves. An escape from our slavery into the deepest 
dungeon in Algiers, would amount to deliverance and emanci- 
pation. One of Col. McDuflie's chattels, who should have the 
good fortune to be cast away into Algerine or West Indian ser- 
vitude, would have to be hand-cufl'ed, before you could get him 
back again to the Land of Liberty. The lowest serfs in Russia 
would hail his arrival among them, with shouts of gratulation. 
There is no human condition, and never was, because there can- 
not and never could be, to which our slave would not abscond, 
with the promptitude of instinct, base spirited and fearful of 
pain, danger and death as he is. There was always enough of 



liberty and humanity in it, to warrant his escape. Whose cap- 
tivity, then, is hkc his ? I speak of it in its best possible estate, 
and those who have fairly considered it, will at once assent to 
what I say. 

"To preach the Gospel to the Poor." Who were those poor 
— they who had little, or they who had nothing, that could have 
nothing, that were incapable of having any thing — who were 
themselves had, owned, possessed and occupied, and " perished 
in the using." Who had not themselves — who could not call 
the weary limbs upon their bodies, or the eyeless soul, that lay 
smothered in its vassal tenement of clay, their own. Who had 
no right, title, interest or estate in or to their nominally own souls 
and bodies. Who were "as poor," not "as poverty," but as' 
Frope7'ty. Who could not own the book of the law, or read 
it, or hear it read — whose amount of mental teaching was how 
to perform the mindless offices of slavery, and whose bread of 
life the "oral instruction" of the duty of contentment in a 
deeper than heathenish spiritual darkness. Had the Saviour to 
preach to any such poor as this ! 

" To heal the broken-hearted." The heart that is merely bro- 
ken, may be healed again. The heart that has been smothered, 
and crushed to death, who caw heal it? The " Balm of Gilead" 
and the " Physician there" yield no medicine to the dead. The 
slave can hardly be called " the broken-hearted." He had a 
heart, but we have extinguished it. His bosom is a church 
yard, tenanted only by the dead. His spirit lies buried within 
him. He is its moving sepulchre. You cannot proflfer conso- 
lation to the slave. Christ himself, it seems to me, w^ould have 
profiered him nothing, had he found such an anomaly among j 
those he came to save. He would have preached to the op- j 
pressor — oh, in what tones ! To the slave he would have , 
addressed nothing, except as he addressed Lazarus, to call him ! 
from the dead. You cannot preach to the slave. " He that ^ 
hath ears to hear, let him hear" — but in slavery there are no 
cars, to catch the sound of the gospel. They tell of the thou- 
sands of professors of religion among the slaves of our South. 
But it is a mockery. There is no religion in slavery. There 
can be none. And the best testimony now shows that it is 
mainly animal excitement, and that they have as little religion 
as liberty. 

" To set at liberty them that are bruised." We imagine we 
apprehend something of the character of slavery. We know 
something of some of its incidents and appendages. We 
know that its labor is unrequited, and that its stimulus and 
motive to exertion is the whip. We have heard the dimensions 
and fashion of that little simple incentive to slave labor, and 
think we can appreciate its capacities for infliction. Perhaps, 
as we observe its influence in a dexterous hand, over the restive 



I 



horse, we can conceive something of its terrors for the naked 
liunian form, in the hand of a veteran and accomplished task- 
master at the South. J5ut there is a scorpion sting in its lash, 
when the form of man and of woman are compelled to yield to it; 
and who can tell the anguish of its scourgings, as they subdue 
the obstinate human spirit, and reduce man to the docility of 
the ox. But with all its terrors, the whip is not slavery. 
Starvation is an item in its incidentals. Slavery knows how to 
keep the human system at the minimum working point, and on 
the least possible sustenance, and thus having no regard to the 
ordinary continuance of human life. It regards human life as 
Napoleon did, — always to be sacrificed to promote the grand 
design. A shrewd, calculating owner — especially one from 
the North, and so recently from there, as to have retained his 
Puritan thrift — he will work up slave life for you, as the April 
sun works up the snow-drift. He will work you up — by sheer 
" kind treatment," and as little whipping as the good of the 
slave requires — a hardy constitution in the prime of life, in four 
years, in the fervent sugar season. This is the natural wear 
and consumption of the " peculiar institution," without high 
pressure or acceleration. And it is highly profitable at that 
•ate of waste. Of course no regard would be paid to the com- 
brtof the slave as to his food. lie toils to earn the means of 
)ampering the palate of an indolent, fastidious master ; while 
le is treated as if he had no palate at all. He receives, at the 
'.and of an owner, the feed of a brute. No table is spread for 
im. The regard paid to the taste, comfort and health of the 
ilest criminal in our State penitentiary, is unknown to the 
noftending — the deserving slave. His animal cravings are 
intalized by an unsatisfying supply, and his humanity insulted 
id mocked with the foddering of a beast. 
Over-working is an item in slavery. How could it be other- 
wise. He is worked for the gain of the master, and the more 
ne works the greater the gain — if he is not over-worked im- 
prudently. But the owner is rarely present to see to this. 
He has an agent, called " overseer" — a sort of sub-tyrant — 
not having the light inducement of ownership to spare the 
slave ; but interested, on the other hand, to make his full 
periodical returns of gain or labor. These subalterns arc 
represented as the most heartless and brutal monsters on earth ; 
uniting, in active operation, the extreme characters of master 
and slave. Why should they be nice about over-working the 
slave? They have had to pass statutes at the South to restrain 
the owners themselves from working the slave too many hours. 
In some States they have restricted him to fourteen or fifteen 
a day ; but they put no restraint on the degree of the overseer's 
activity upon the slave. The master cannot regulate this, if 
he would ; and a slaveholder could not be expected to care for 

Q 



10 

those he is willing to enslave. Multitudes are unavoidably 
worked to death, and die in their ranks. Slave labor, in itself, 
is exhausting and destructive to life ; while free labor is health- 
ful and friendly to strength and life. It is man's allotted exer- 
cise and portion on earth. God commands him to moisten his 
brow in it, and to eat the bread that he earns with the sweat 
of his forehead ; a poor warrant for slaveholdmg, which eats 
without any sweat of its own. Hardy and cheerful old age is 
the common result of severe free labor, exerted for ourselves 
and those we love. But slave labor is exhausting, reluctant, 
forced, whip-extracted, unnatural and fatal. It is wrung out 
of the sullen and spiritless machinery by the power of the 
whip, and the machinery will no more move to perform it, 
without this power, than the wheel without water. Mr. Adams 
very fitly called the slaves the machinery of the South ; and it 
is their machinery — it is the " labor-saving machinery" of the 
slothful white man. And by what sort of " power" is it driv- 
en? Not by water power, or by steam power, as ingenuity has 
contrived here to save the toil of free labor — but by whip- 
power. 

Man is not worked alone on the plantation, or over- worked 
there. Woman machinery is plied there, at field labor. In 
these unwholesome flats, beneath the fervid sun of the South, 
woman toils at a service intolerable to man, unless when free- 
dom nerves his arm, and her fainting, faltering machinery is 
driven by the same terrible potver. And while one thousand 
water-falls are turning the wheels and giving life to the spin- 
dles and looms of manufacture here, in the upland north, and 
making the land resound with labor-saving industry, slavery, 
throughout the low and level South, plies her ten thousand 
whips, to drive man and woman machinery, to furnish forth 
the material for its sister water power of the North. 

I commend to the particular and calm consideration of this 
female auditory — especially those not infatuated with this aboli- 
tion mania, ('if any such have deigned to be here) — this branch 
of our " American System" of machinery and manufacture. 
Woman at field, slave labor, under the southern sun, pro- 
pelled by whip power ! ! I commend it to their unexcited, 
cool, philosophical consideration ! It is true, it is colored 
woman, (though not always deeply colored) and that makes a 
material difference as to the matter ot sympathy ; but still, after 
making all allowance to the rights of our Southern brethren, 
and to our own Christian prejudices, I appeal to you. if the 
hue of the complexion, or the form of the feature, or the tex- 
ture of the hair, or any other indication of the absence of 
" Saxon descent," can entirely relieve the unhappy machinery 
from all sense of the unpleasantness of that sort of power ? 
The poor dark sister, sometimes slightly weary — perhaps a 



11 

little discouraged — pcrad venture sick, (for a peculiarity of this 
machinery is liability to all these) then, when working at her 
utmost stretch of despairing endurance, the stimulating impulse 
must, I should tiiink, bo extremely unwelcome ! The overseer 
too, who regulates this propelling power, is not habitually 
polite, or delicate in iiis applications. He administers, with 
slight courtesy or ceremony, his enlivener of plantation indus- 
try. We read of Southern chivalry, but surely this cannot be 
its occasion or its display. 

I say nothing of the buying and seUing and transferring and 
separating, incident to our immense, boundless domestic traf- 
fic ; of the rending asunder these strong humano-animal ties, 
or the numberless other incidentals of the system. They do 
not, all that can be named, constitute the thing slavery. It 
cannot be described. It cannot be apprehended. It can no 
more be conceived, than endured. God only knows what it is 
in its extent. The slaveholder can give no account of it — the 
slave cannot tell of it — he can shiver at thought of its all sub- 
duing whip, and its disgusting, despairing labor, — he feels, to the 
extent of the power left in him, a sort of heart-break when 
tiie few objects of his strong atiection are rent away from his 
sight. He runs away from its apparition, to be hunted up by 
the hound, or shot down by the cliivalrous young sportsman. 
He hides from it in the bush and starves to death rather than 
look at it again, — or gives his scarred body to the ravens on the 
friendly bough — but he can give no account of slavery with his 
tongue. The sojourner from the North — the young gentleman, 
who migrates thither for a season to relieve himself from college 
debts by teaching amid its generous salaries — or the invalid cler- 
gyman, who performs a sort of missionary tour into its bland 
climates, and who experiences the charm of its hospitalities — 
they can give you no account of slavery. They ascertain to be 
sure that it has " been exaggerated,'' but they cannot describe to 
you what it is. God knows what it is — He alone can fathom 
its unutterable mysteries. 

But what have we to do with all this ? What right or power 
have Concord women to interfere for its suppression ? tJnder 
what obligations are you to associate in regard to it ? These are 
the questions. My friends, you have every thing to do with 
this slavery — you are the cause of its existence — through your 
culpable apathy, and your pro-slavery pride and hard-hearted- 
ness, this system has lived and flourished in your country. — 
You can abolish it. and you are bound to do it. God and hu- 
manity will hold you answerable for its continuance. You are 
deeply concerned and implicated in the system, and always have 
been, and always must be, until it is abolished. It subsists by 
your countenance — by your silent acquiescence. Female influ- 
ence at the North enslaves women at the South. I need not 



1^2 

labor to show this — any mind sees it at once, that is willing to 
look at it. The connection, in this country, between general 
usages and customs, and popular opinions, every body under- 
stands and acknowledQCs. The voice of woman in forminof and 
regulating public opinion, every body admits. Your voice has 
always been for slavery — it has never been raised against it. — • 
Your conduct and demeanor have never been in discountenance 
of it. Who of you ever thought it a blen)ish in the character 
of a southern lady, that she held slaves? When she has come 
North, followed by her human spaniels, who of you ever whis- 
f>ered a word of reproof or admonition to her, or thought she de- 
served it ? No one, and the more of a train she had, the profound- 
er your estimation. Who of you ever thouglit it amiss, that the 
young northern fortune hunter married a rich slave estate at the 
South ? It has always been accounted honorable, fortunate, 
enviable, to marry a plantation. The northern Christian and the 
northern minister, might doit, and not the slightest impeachment 
of his piety. This could never be the case, without female 
countenance and approbation here. If the women of the North 
had frowned upon slaveholding, and held it criminal and infa- 
mous, as they ought to have done, northern men would have so 
regarded it, — the northern church would so have esteemed it 
and treated it, and testified of it, — and would not her sister 
church at the South have been influenced by this? Could not 
the southern church long ago have been brought to feel that 
slaveholding was a daring crime against God, and if she lelt 
this, would she not forsake that sin, and testify against it ? — 
Would not the pulpit of the South have lifted up its voice 
against this mother of all iniquity and abomination ? The 
southern religious press and all her presses, would they have set 
the church and the pulpit at defiance? Are the South moral 
monsters, proof against all moral and religious influence ! Have 
abolitionists ever slandered the South by an accusation like this ? 
Who are they that accuse you of denouncing and irritating the 
South ? They who say there is no southern conscience ; — that 
the church at the South is dead to the voice of Reason and 
Truth, — that you can never convince the South that enslaving 
and slaveholdino; are crimes. This reform must indeed origin- 
ate in the North. The South cannot begin it. They are com- 
paratively in no condition to begin it. It is as much as we 
ought to ask and expect of them to follow in it, after we have 
given them the lead. It is impossible almost for them to effect 
it until after a reformation here. We are guiltier than they, 
and our guilt is far easier of repentance and reformation. Our 
guilt lies in the way of their reformation. They cannot act 
until we do, and they must be acted upon. We must raise the 
standard, and it must be sustained and cheered on to triumph 
by northern woman. If she have any peculiar jaromwce anc/ 
sphere, it is to head this moral reformation. 



1.3 

How does slavery subsist at the South ? By what tide docs 
t})C white man hold the colored iiiairs jiht rty ? {{y lawful 
title as he does his horse or his laud ? No, my friends — no 
such thing, the master has no legal title to his slave. lie never 
can have. There is no human law for it — no southern law even. 
You are told the law is in favor of slavery and in the way of 
emancipation, but it is not so. Slavery is in violation of law, and 
in defiance of all Constitutions. You have got no laws to re- 
peal or to pass, at the South or elsewhere. Slavcholding is no 
more lawful at the South, than dueling is — or gambling — or 
dirking with the Bowie knife. The custom and the crime are 
only a little more general and popular. That slavcholding is 
universal there, makes it pass for law. It goes for law, because 
nobody disputes it. If the poor slave had an advocate to 
demand the law in his behalf, the tribunals of the South would 
have to allow him law and liberty. He cannot have justice 
now, because he has no man to ask it for him. A^either can he 
have it in the District of Columbia. He can't petition there — 
even Mr. Adams asks a slaveholding Speaker if it would be 
proper to present the petiiion of a slave. And when that ven- 
erable champion asserts that he would hear a slave, he declares 
also that he would hear the petition of a dog, if it were prof- 
fered to him. Our Congress denies the slave's right to petition. 
Why so, if the law on hearing his petition would not award him 
justice and liberty? Why should the slave at the seat of gov- 
ernment be denied the right of petition for his liberty, and his 
right at the hand of Congress? Because he may not properly 
petition ? — or because his petition cannot safely be received and 
denied ? Why do they refuse to hear the slave, in our nation- 
al Congress ? Because by our national law he can't be heard 
there ? No. We have no such law. He is denied for the same 
reason that you are — because he makes a claim there that if 
heard and considered they cannot resist, and are determined 
never to grant him. They deny you there. Hear what they 
have done with your own Right of Petition, on the '22d of the 
present December, — the anniversarij of your Pilgrim Land- 
ing. " Resolved that all Petitions relating to the abolition of 
slavery in the District of Columbia" — (not petitions ol' slaves 
but '"all petitions") — "all resolutions and petitions in relation 
to the buying and selling of slaves, and every thing in relation 
to slavery be laid on the table, without discussion, without 
reference, without reading and without printing." This reso- 
lution was presented by a Virginian. A New-Hampshire mem- 
ber moved to dispense with all rule and order, to let the resolu- 
tion have immediate i)lace, and it was voted by your Congress 
1.35 to GO. The Virginian then made a speech, without order, 
preliminary to the previous question, and then moved it, to 
jjrevent reply. Mr. Adams rose to [)rotest against it, and vvas 



14 

cried down by a lumdicd voicos, and tlic question, quelling de- 
bale, was voted by I '24. The gag resolution was then passed 
without discussion, 122 to 74. On this I make no other com- 
ment than that they have the same right to pass it on your peti- 
tions, thatlhey have to smother the petition of a colored slave, 
and they have the same right to do it in our Congress, that they 
have in a Southern Legislature or court of justice. The slave 
has a right to be heard in Congress on his petition. He has a 
right to petition, not because a dog has a right to complain, but 
(with deference to Mr. Adams) because a man has a right to 
•complain. The slave is a man, and therefore a petitioner — an 
American man, and therefore a rightful petitioner in American 
courts and tlie American Congress — and he will be heard there, 
whenever his rights are boldly and manfully demanded for him, 
and that without repealing or passing any laws. The funda- 
mental and eternal principles of Right and Law, which give 
the white man Right and Liberty, give the black man and any 
man the same. A man has them, because he is human, and he 
has them inalienably. No mortal enactment can deprive him 
of them, and it has to be done, if it all, by force, and so it is 
done by slavery. I care not for usage or custom or fashion. — 
They never can make law, in this country, of such a thing as 
slaveholding. It is said the constitution of your country is in 
your way. I will not trouble you with any formal argument to 
disprove this. That a free constitution should sanction or war- 
rant slavery, is an idea too absurd and preposterous, to require 
any thing but the mere statement to refute it. A constitution 
providing or permitting slavery ! A constitution, by which your 
right may be taken from you, and given to me ! Impossible. 
Would our great statesmen covet the glory of " Defenders of 
such a constitution !" The American Constitution is a free one. 
It was ordained in behalf of liberty. It guarantees it to every 
man. You need not even read it to be convinced of this. The 
contrary idea is impossible. A constitution that should attempt 
to sanction slavery, would be a moral and a legal monstrosity. 
Is there a woman here, that would live in a country with such a 
constitution ? Is there a Christian or a man here, that would 
not flee such a country ? Is there a descendant of those Pil- 
grims that could not brook the slight infringements of liberty 
which drove them here from country and home, that would stay 
here under a constitution that would strip a man of every 
thing, that constitutes him — every right he has and every ingre- 
dient he is made "p of — that turns him into an article for the 
inventory — thi anks immortal woman with swine! I deny 
indignantly, bv' Vre the women of this auditory, that such a 
constitution exists in the country they remain in. I ask you to 
read the constitution. I think you can understand it. I think 
it is within " your sphere" to read it. It controls all enact- 



15 

monts of your Congress, and the constitutions and acts of all 
the States, and it forbids the violation of any man's lihertv. 
But if it were otherwise, so much the more need of your Soci- 
ety and its influence. If we have shivery laws, a moral senti- 
ment must he created that shall abrogate them — and w»jmaii 
must lead the van in its formation. Her position in society 
makes it her place and her duty. If the laws of South Carolina 
enslave and imbrute a southern woman the women and men of 
Nevv-IIampshire are bound to shed a moral influence upon the 
people of that State, that shall repeal that law. Why not ? Are 
State lines impassable to moral intluence? Is your moral influ- 
ence bounded by the lines of your little State? Is it bounded 
on the south by the line of Massaciiusetts, and " west by the 
western bank of Connecticut river?" Are your moral respon- 
sibilities bounded by these limits? Arc your missionary obliga- 
tions bounded east by the western sliorcs of tiie Atlantic ocean? 
No, my friends, nor by the eastern shores either — nor by the 
Indian ocean. They double the capes — traverse the isles afar 
ort^ in the wide Pacific. Juggernaut, as it lumbers along over 
the prostrate devotee, and the smoke of the pyre in which the 
Hindoo widow aspires to reunite herself to her departed hus- 
band, all lie clearly within the jurisdiction of your charities, and 
you no more let distance and ocean barriers release you from 
your missionary efforts there, than from domestic duties in your 
households, or khid offices amons: your poor or sick neighbors. 
The Carolinas lie at your door. Your influence alights upon 
them, with the velocity of the steamboat and the rail car. It 
flies to them on the wings of the press and in the voice of 
rumor. This very meeting will reach them, with the flight of 
your public mail. If the northern press were free and faithful 
to its trust, it would shower an influence at once upon the entire 
South, ihtit would affect usages, laws and every thing else 
there. Your hands do not conduct that press — but you have 
influence with the hands, heads and hearts that do. 

It is one of the current objections that you have no right to 
interfere. This seems hardly to deserve an answer — but it must 
be noticed. In some modes of interference, I admit you have 
no right. In some ways, interference would do no good. In 
all the objectionable ways, it would do none. Your State Leg- 
islature may not pass enactments against the crime of slave- 
holding in Carolina. No abolitionist thinks they can, or that it 
would be useful it they could. Legislation in Carolina itself is 
not wanted for the abolition of slavery therp. It is unlawful 
there now. Legislation is not wanted an\ v ''cre. It is not 
wanted in Congress, in order to make slavery i^ the slave trade 
in the District unlawful. They are both so now. Nothing can 
be wanted of the national orState Legislature, but to prcs(;ril)e 
the penalty for the conunission of the crime. Congress should 



IG 

declare the domestic slave trade to be the crime it has declared 
the foreign trade to be, and alK\ the same penalty to it. It 
need not declare tiic traffic urjiawful, in order to make it so. 
We petition Congress in order to bring the subject before the 
nation, and if possible to have discussion in that body strike out 
the truth for the mind and conscience of the country. Discus- 
sion will reveal to the dullest eye the enormity of slavery and 
will give it its place in the execration of mankind. 

You may not interfere with slavery by sending armies to fight 
it down — allhough all admit we are bound to march to its 
defence, should the enslaved at any time strike for their liberty. 
But armies cannot conquer it. You may not advise the slaves 
to avenge their wrongs. Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord, I 
will repay. As to insurrection, those who do not allow them 
the right to that, must be cauiious about giving vent to their 
Fourth of July patriotism. They must hush the voice of cel- 
ebration. The copies of that old " flourish of rhetoric" by the 
continental committee put forth to help us through our insur- 
rection against the British parliament, for their abridgement of 
the sacred right of tea-drinking, must all be suppressed. We 
must hide out of sight and hearing, all those " self-evident 
truths," that we have aforetime so unwarily trumpeted through 
tlie land — lest they strike the ear of some listening slave. 
Abolitionists have been accused of instigating the slaves to rise 
upon their masters. The accusation is a bloody-minded false- 
hood, intended to excite the mob to insurrection against us and 
to curry favor with the South. James T. Austin accused Eli- 
jah P. Lovejoy of this in Faneuil Hall. It was a base slander, 
and uttered in the worst spirit of the Alton mob — and intended 
no doubt to excite popular violence in the meeting. But James 
T. Austin, in his 4th of July blusters — if he has ever played 
the orator on that day — and all our host of pro-slavery declaim- 
ers — have done all that could be done to disseminate the prin- 
cij)les of insurrection, by proclaiming in the ears of the land, 
inalienable liberty, and the sacred right to resist oppression by 
force. Abolitionists teach no such lessons. They teach noth- 
ing to the slave. They speak not to his dull ear. Their cry 
is to God, that he will give him patience to wait a peaceful dis- 
enthralment, and to the oppressor, that he repent and forsake 
his oppression. They cry to God, too, that he may have 
patience with the heaven-daring country, till truth can awaken 
us to repentance. They advocate the universal duty of non- 
resistance by violence and enforce it with their practice — while 
pro-slavery patriotism has read tlie old insurrectionary Declara- 
tion of Independence, and pointed the slave to Bunker Hill and 
to Yorktown, as the way to vindicate these " self-evident" 
rights. And who that holds to the principles of our revolution, 
can deny to the slave the horrible right of insurrection? — and 



17 

why is his insurrection for liberty worse than Jolin Hancock's, 
and Samuel Adams's, and Joseph Warren's? If they had tlie 
right, HK HAS IT, and his occasion for its exercise is infinite com- 
pared with theirs. That occasion, my friends, I pray you may 
speedily take away, and I would meantime caution the oppres- 
sor against talking too freely about the doings of the revolu- 
tionary fathers. Indeed he is growing prudent about it. The 
old " rhetorical flourish" is rarely read aloud of late. 

We may not interfere through the medium of the slave. He 
has nothing to do with the question. But if we do not i)revail 
in this enterprise and prevail in season, there will arise a ques- 
tion, in which he will have a voice and a hand. And let the 
land take warning, — -that question will arise, as sure as the rapid 
and auffmenting increase of his numbers and his strength. It 
will come as sure as there is warning in human history — ^same- 
ness in human nature and retribution in heaven. Let those 
deride and hinder the anti-slavery enterprise, who desire its 
coming. But the avoidance of that catastrophe by means of 
your moral agitation, the slave has no part in. That must be 
accomplished by the oppressor, and first and mainly at the 
North. I repeat it, the South cannot begin. We have no right 
to ask her to. She stands at disadvantage and nmst be reached 
by the reflection of northern light. The grand doctrine of 
human equality of right and brotherhood, as taught in the New 
Testament, must obtain here in the North, and be embraced 
practically and from the heart, — religiously, and not in the ab- 
stract. We have kept it abstract long enough — and difficult 
and arduous as is the task of bringing it into practice, it can 
be done, and we have got it to do — and thanks to Heaven, 
faithful and mighty agencies are at work to effect it. This doc- 
trine must be infused into the northern church and the northern 
pulpit. That ilital and infidel delusion, that the slave is not a 
man, but of an inferior rank of being, and that " expediency" 
demands the continuance of his enslavement, must be expelled 
the northern pulpit. The prayers, tears, voice and every infla- 
ence of man and of woman must be put in requisition to this 
effect. Woman must be prominent in the work. I do not say 
particularly, that it is her especial part and duty to advocate 
publicly. Shame on us if we oblige her to do it. Men ought, 
as custom is, to do the public lecturing and the editing and 
printing. But if they wont do it, woman must — and she will 
be far less away from her sphere, than she is, delving among 
slave men, in the southern rice flat. It will become her more 
and weary her less. Men should do the rougher and more 
active offices of emancipation — but if they decline them, they 
nmst be performed by more generous and sympathetic woman. 
No wise woman will withhold her hand, if the cause demands 
3 



18 

it. She will rather pump with her own fair hand, than have 
the ship sink. 

Women must associate — they must read, write, pray, con- 
tribute, work, discuss in conversational circles, instill anti-slavery 
truth into the young mind and into the old mind. They must 
agitate the conscience of the community — they must petition, 
and if men wont spare them the unwelcome labor, they must 
lecture and print. There must be female witnesses ready if 
need be to encounter the bloody spirit of the times — to be per- 
secuted and mobbed like the gifted and generous stranger, who 
was once assailed by brute violence, for addressing the very 
association to whom I am now speaking, and whose noble life 
was hunted here amid your meeting houses and printing 
presses, for liberty of speech and of conscience, when your 
quiet streets resounded with the savage yell, unheard here 
before since the days of your Indian massacre. Women must 
encounter all this. It becomes woman to do it. It is her 
sphere. Slavery must be abolished at all sacrifices. You must 
see that it is done. You are as responsible for its being done, 
as men are. You are more responsible — for you have more 
moral influence. Be not too careful about keeping within any 
fashionable sphere. Do your duty. That is your sphere. — • 
Abolish slavery among you. Deliver your sister from her hor- 
rible thraldom. Rescue her from the monster, that is dishonor- 
ing and devouring her. Do whatever coward and slothful man 
leaves undone. And shame on the ungenerous man, that will 
taunt and insult you, for doing his neglected duty. And why 
is all this hue and cry about woman's lecturing and writing. Is 
it the first time that she has transcended her sphere and mingled 
in the efforts and enterprises of men ? Have not ladies left 
their toilette and gone into the very camp, and wrought their 
own dresses into dressings for the wounds of the soldier ? — 
Have they not descended into the besieged trench and worked 
at the fortifications with their own gentle hands, and mounted 
the rampart in time of siege, and even [)ointed and fired the 
cannon in the field and on the wall, and have not all voices 
proclaimed her heroine ? Was she in her sphere in the dust 
and smoke and fury of fighting brute men, and is she out of it, 
when she opens her mouth to plead before her free sisters, in 
behalf of her sister in bondage ! She may fight like a beast of 
prey, in the midst of infuriated, demoniac men, and it becomes 
her delicate nature and her gentle sex — but if she petitions her 
countrymen, in behalf of suflering and outraged humanity, and 
the violated law, under which she lives, forsooth " she is out of 
her sphere," and the press and pulpit raise the hue and cry 
against her to clamor her into silence. Angelina E. Grimke, of 
Charleston, South Carolina, a quakeress, visited the North to 
tell her free countrywomen the secrets of the prison-house of 



19 

the South. From holding circles of conversation, she address- 
ed them as they thronged her to hear in female assemblies. — 
The fame of lier eloquence spread through the country and 
curious gentlemen felt an irresistible desire to hear her speak 
and intruded themselves among her auditors. They were over- 
powered by her arguments and conscience smitten at the truths 
she disclosed, and went away and set up an alarm, that she had 
got out of her sphere and was usurping the prerogative of the 
wiser sex, and that the church and the union were in danger. 
Who are these men, that are so scandalized at Miss Grimke's 
speaking in public and that regard this unusual atlair of a wo- 
man's speaking aloud with more apprehension than they do the 
enslavement of a sixth part ot their nation ? Who are they 
that make all this ado, when a woman " oversteps the modesty 

of' fashion, and ofl'cnds the decorum of this j)recious 

community, — who cry aloud and spare not, — and yet when the 
wail of ten thousand women comes up from the abyss of bond- 
age on the south wind, they are as dumb as a watch dog that 
has eat himself to sleep on his master's threshold ! Shame on 
your presses and your pulpits, that make this senseless and 
inconsistent outcry about this noble woman, and shame on the 
North, that obliges her to come from the regions of slavcholding, 
to awaken freemen to the first principles of liberty. If the 
noble minded and generous hearted Grimke is out of her sphere, 
it is because others are out of theirs and she is obliged to step 
into it. If she is doing a duty that does not belong to her, it 
is because it has been basely abandoned by those to whom it 
does belong, and it is with an ill grace, that they make it mat- 
ter of charge against her. And is it becoming in us at a time 
like this, to be discussing matters of precedency between the 
sexes who shall lecture and who not, when we have barely time 
if we have it at all, to escape destruction with our united host and 
whole eftbrts ? It will take all the talent, all the zeal and all 
the agency in the land to meet the terrible exigency of our 
case. To the wall, then, all hands and hearts ! — every one, 
male and female, old and young, where they can best lend a 
hand, and wherever a champion advances most gallantly the 
standard of Truth and Liberty, let there be no question of the 
prerogative of sex or rank. All who are valiantly in the war- 
fare, cannot be out of their sphere, and all who are not — cannot 
be in it. 

American slavery is the crime and curse of the whole land. 
Its root and life principle are in the North. The tree not only 
overshadows the North, but its roots run up here and are inter- 
twined among the rocks of the soil of freedom. Here it de- 
rives its nutriment and here it must be overthrown. It must 
fall by the axe of Free Discussion. This mighty and peaceful 
weapon every body can wield. It is this that slavcholding dreads, 



20 

and begs you, commands you not to take up. The South asks 
the North to sustain her slave system by its silence. She says 
,Vo us — all we demand of you, is that you keep still and hold 
•your peace. We don't want to hear you talk on this subject in 
our eats. You disturb our tranquillity and agitate us. We 
can't discuss the subject — we can't allow you to discuss it — it 
must not be discussed. We don't want your vindication of our 
institutions. You need not speak in favor of slavery. Your 
clergy and doctors need not quote scripture, nor your states- 
men and patriots argue the constitution. We get no defence 
by that here or elsewhere. It gives our minds no satisfaction at 
all. All we want is for you to be still, as you always have been, 
until this agitation of your fanatics. Treat the free negroes as 
you have done — promote colonization to drain off as many of 
them as you can, out of sight of our slaves, and out of sight of 
the conscience of your church, and we will take care of slavery. 
Promote colonization. You find funds, and we will find secre- 
tary and officers, and orators to make the speeches. But let 
there be no discussion among you at the North. You don't 
know how to talk on this " delicate subject." And my fiiends, 
they judge and talk shrewdly, and if we would be still, they 
would maintain slavery till God sent a remedy for it in a civil 
war and the extermination or enslavement, in turn, of the white 
people of this nation. We have been still, and now we have 
begun to agitate our communities, the South bids us be silent. 
She has sent up her mandates to our governors, requiring them 
to enact laws to silence our lecturers, and disperse our anti- 
slavery meetings, and muzzle our free presses. And when pro- 
slavery governors and general courts have not dared to encoun- 
ter the awkward old Constitutions and Bills of Rights, by enact- 
ing gag statutes, they have, in the meaner and moi'e servile 
States, passed vassal resolutions, and called on the mob to en- 
force them. And presses and pulpits have lent their aid in 
summoning the ruffian mob to the work — and most promptly 
has a craven and degenerate community obeyed the summons. 
'The land has rung with outrage and violence, till at last mur- 
der has laid its bloody hand on the mouth of discussion and on 
the press. The massacre of Elijah P. Lovejoy and the bold 
and repeated destruction of his press, openly, in a free State, 
and the perfect impunity and popularity of the deed are an 
awlul illustration. of the state of the country. Slavery has been 
charged on the South and disclaimed here, and abolitionists 
have been fiercely told to go there, where slavery is, and not 
disturb community here, where it is not. They have labored to 
show that it existed in spirit here — but with tardy success, till 
the murder at Alton has burst upon the land, in proof like a 
clap of thunder. There Alton and St. Louis — Illinois and 
Missouri — the North and the South have met — on the free side 



21 

of slavery's line and shaken hands upon the bloody system. 
They have pledged tliemselves in behalf of perpetual slavery — 
offered up to it with mutual hand, freedom of speech and the 
liberty of the Press, and sealed their foul covenant and drinked 
over their pledge, in the blood of a martyr. And the land has 
heard it and sanctioned the compact. The northern press has 
sullenly cursed the selfishness of Lovejoy that led to the dcvel- 
opement — while the southern press denounces and disclaims the 
murder, for fear it will make abolitionists. They need not fear. 
It will take many such tragedies to give them any ground of 
alarm. 

But you have been agitating the community for years, and 
slavery is not abolished. You have filled the land with mobs 
and division and " bad feelings," and have emancipated no 
slaves. As to mobs and divisions, let those answer who are 
guilty. Anti-slavery employs no mobs — it generates no bad 
feelings in those who embrace it — creates no division, which 
ought not to be created, until all are united for the abolition of 
slavery. It is true slavery still subsists and but few of the 
slaves are liberated. But anti-slavery docs not aim at individual 
emancipation. It strikes at tiie system. To the charge that 
you have not liberated a single slave, I offer the reply of Gko. 
Thompson to Rev. Mr. Breckenridge : — " On the night of 31st 
July, 1834," said he, " what had British abolitionists done for 
emancipation in the West Indies ? They had excited mobs and 
exasperated the planters — they had put back emancipation — 
they had divided churches and created ill feeling, throughout 
England, but had not emancipated a single slave. But how 
was it the morning of the 1st of August ! There breathed not 
a slave in the British Islands ! The sun went down the night 
before on 800,000 slaves. It rose that morning on 800,000 
freemen ! A pretty night's work," said Mr. Thompson — and 
such a night's work will yet be done here. And why is it not 
done already ? Because those who complain that you have 
done nothing, are standing in your way. The respectability 
and the Christian profession of the North are in your way. — 
They are standing between you and the conscience of the 
southern church. Who are }our most formidable opponents in 
this righteous enterprise ? They are your doctor Fisks and 
Professor Stuarts, who are frightening tlie church at the North, 

and your attorney general Austins and your governor 

(blanks) who keep awake the j)ride and prejudices 



and fears of the people, — who quote scripture and libel the 
constitution in behalf of oppression — who hold and harangue 
the preliminary, niob-breeding meetings — who mingle their 
faint disapprobation of mobs " in the abstract,'^ with fierce de- 
nunciations and slanders asrainst the abolitionists. Your cler- 
gymen, who decline to give notice of your prayer meetings, or 



22 

give them coldly and significantly " on request,''' with a reluc- 
tance they would scarcely feel, I had almost said, to notify a 
training or a cnravan from the pulpit ; — who merely suggest 
now and then, that servant in the translation is slave in the 
original ; who think lecturing on the colored man's right to the 
Bible, is a desecration of the Sabbath and ot the pulpit. These 
men, who hold the moral and political reins among us, are the 
inveterate enemies of negro emancipation, and of any moral 
agitation in behalf of the slave, and they are the main obsta- 
cles in your way, except perhaps our dainty-spirited, pro-slavery 
ladies, who cannot endure this shocking, vulgar, negro aboli- 
tionism. 

The field, my respected friends, for the great conflict that 
must liberate the slave, is the northern church meeting and the 
northern prayer meeting. There we must wrestle with God 
and with man, and Christian women must lead, or at least go 
abreast in the van of the conflict. Conquer the northern 
church, and its southern " institution" falls. Break up the 
church's criminal silence on the subject of this heaven-daring 
abomination, and the foul system perishes in the light of truth. 

And my Christian friends, you must do this for the sake of 
the church. You cannot advance her cause in the face of 
American slavery. You can't dream of the millenium until 
your slavery is abolished. You can't have this country a 
Christian nation, till the negro's eye is allowed to look upon 
the Bible. You can expect no more revivals of religion, while 
your pulpit shrinks froiu the advocacy enjoined by the Sa- 
viour himself in the synagogues of Nazareth. You can never 
shed a gospel influence on heathen lands from a region of 
slaveholding Christianity — and that continent of Africa, which 
after all has got to be confessed as a portion of the world we 
live in — the world to be given to Christ, when he shall have the 
heathen for his inheritance — how can you look Africa in the 
face, while you cherish the enslavement of her children. That 
injured and ill-fated continent, where the commerce of Chris- 
tendom has thronged and flocked these centuries, like eagles to 
the carcass, to traffic in humanity, and towards whom mission- 
ary charity has hardly had the eftVontcry to cast a glance — you 
never will think of sending her the gospel, with the Nimrod 
spirit you now cherish toward the compJexion of her children. 
You may send out your few and scattered missionaries, charged 
with your message of Christianity to the heathen, while the 
guilty country is sending forth in every form influences, a thou- 
sand to one, to counteract and give the lie to your benevolent 
professions. Ileal your own Christianity — convert your own 
slaveholding heathen. Stop your manufacture of colored hea- 
then here — your home manufacture — ^before you make further 
professions of love to heathen abroad. Your professions are 



23 

false. Cease withliolding the Bible and the hght of salvation 
from the slave millions in your own midst. Cast this enormous 
beam of heathenism out of your nation's eye and the eye of 
your national church and charity, before you pretend further 
solicitude for the mote in the eye of India and China. Make 
your peace with the defrauded, Jiunted and exiled Itulian, whose 
blood cries to God from the whole ground beneath our feet — 
whom we have driven from his country and home, by the hand 
of fraud and violence, and then hypocritically sent a few mis- 
sionaries after him into the wilderness. Christianize your own 
church. Then will your nation shine in the eyes of mankind — 
a city on a hill — a missionary beacon light that will (lame to 
heaven and beam to the ends of the earth, cnhghtening and 
converting the nations, without your sending abroad a single 
torch. Then will your prayers ascend to God for the salvation 
of the heathen, unattended with the moan of your despairing 
slaves and the lament and curse of the vanishing Indian ; and 
your sacrifices to the Lord be ofYered and your mites cast into 
his treasury, unmingled with the price of blood, and " hire kept 
back by fraud." 



T II I II D AN N U A I. R 1-: 1' () R 'I' 



CONCORD FEMALE ANTI SLAVERY SOCIETY. 



Three years have passed away since some twenty or thirty females 
of Concord, who had heard of the wrongs of the shnc and com- 
miserated his hapless condition, " bcMng convinced of the justice 
and necessity of the immediate emancipation of those held in bond- 
age," formed themselves into a society (auxiliary to the Ncw- 
Hampsliire Anti-Slavery Society,) whose declared objects were " to 
endeavor by all means sanctioned by law, humanity and religion, to 
effect the inuuediate abolition of slavery in these United States, to 
improve the character and condition of the free people of color, 
and to remove those long, deep-rooted prejudices peculiar to our 
own country, against the African race." 



24 

Thoifffii' a little, feeble band, with a work of such vast magnitude 
before them, they caine forth, relying on Him who executeth righ- 
teousness for the oppressed, iu full faith that he would enable them 
in some humble measure, " to aid and assist by their eftbrts and 
influence, those, who striving against our great national sin, were 
engaged in the cause of God and the best good of our country." 

It is yet fresh in our recollection that we were met with opposi- 
tion at the very outset. Even while associating ourselves in the 
fear of God for the promotion of this work of justice and mercy, 
we were assailed by violent if not malignant opposition in the fear- 
ful form which it has since assumed in so many of our cities and 
villages, recently shedding the heart's blood of one of our most 
estimable citizens. Yes ! on the memorable fourteenth of No- 
vember, 1834, the peaceable village of Concord for the first time 
(would it had been the last) was dishonored by the gathering of a 
mob. And for what ? To disturb and disperse an assembly of un- 
offending, unpretending women ! True the alleged reason was that 
George Thompson, " a foreigner and an Englishman," was present, 
but we may be allowed to remark that this " foreigner," was not at 
every meeting that was so disturbed. It was on a subsequent occa- 
sion declared in one of the leading papers of the town, that " the 
excitement was no stronger against Thompson personally, than 
against the cause in which he is engaged." Yet we do not cherish 
unkind remembrances. We bring not a railing accusation against 
our town. Though we may not in this instance " pardon something 
to the spirit of liberty," it is a palliation of the offence, that those 
deluded men were blinded by the influences of the demon of slavery, 
who has cast a more potent spell over the minds of northern free- 
men than they are aware ; and we desire to adopt the prayer, " Fath- 
er, forgive them, for they know not what they do." 

Owing to (he intrepidity of the Rev. George Storrs, a fearless 
champion of right and righteousness, the meeting was not suffered 
to be broken up. The names were signed with firm hearts, if with 
trembling hands, and the association was formed. 

Such was the origin of our society. A brief sketch of its efforts, 
and allusions to some of the thrilling occurrences of these three 
eventful years, will constitute this, our third Annual Report. 

The annals of Anti Slavery for the years 1835-6, present an 
appalling list of mobs and riots, in which New-Hampshire had a 
most disgraceful share. Indeed these " outbreakings of public sen- 
timent," as they were softly termed, were in almost every place 
simultaneous with the first meetings of the friends of the slave. — 
Abolitionists in all places have been the subjects of scorn and 
reproach, and in most, the victims of bitter, and sometimes, alas ! 
bloody persecution. Though Wm. Lloyd Garrison had been nearly 
five years endeavoring in thunder-tones to rouse the nation from its 
deadly apathy, though the youthful disciples of freedom who went 
out from the Lane Seminary had raised their piercing voices in the 
same cry ; though the resistless eloquence of George Thompson 
had reached the hearts and consciences of thousands in the free 
States; and other faithful laborers had continued the alarm : yet so 
thoroughly had the spirit of slavery incorporated itself with the feel- 



25 

ijicTS, the prcjiuiicos, and the interests of th<> i)eo|)l(>, tliat those who 
opened their months for the (himh, and advocated immediate emanci- 
pation, were viewed as fanatical disturl)ers of the puhlic peace, and 
pronounced by hiah autliority to be " indictabit; at common law." 
Still they deemed it their duty to " obey (jod rather than men," and 
persisted in their efforts to enlighten and arouse the puiilic mind 
Facts, appallinof, astounding, heart-moving facts, in relation to 
slavery, were continually developed. Many of the horrible secrets 
of that prison-house were disclosed. An(l they were snflicient to 
harrow up our souls. In view of that abominable system of legal- 
ized wrong and outrage, we were excited to work with all diligence 
to help dispel the " darkness which might be felt" in the community 
around us. Receiving a goodly accession to our number, we 
wrought with our own hands to raise funds and procure publica- 
tions for gratuitous distribution. 

By referring to our Report for 1835, wc find that we subscribed 
for one copy of the Liberator, six copies of the Herald of Freedom, 
three of the Quarterly Magazine and twenty-five of the Anti-Slavery 
Record. And by contributing fifty dollars to the funds of the 
American Anti-Slavery Society, we were furnished with a large 
number of their publications, including the Slave's Friend, a peri- 
odical admirably adapted to the juvenile portion of the community, 
for gratuitous circulation. We also procured addresses from some 
able advocates of the cause, and corresponded with sister societies 
who had preceded us in the good work. 

It was in October, 1835, that the great mob of rcspectahlr citi- 
zens was gathered in Boston, by which the dispersion of the Female 
Anti-Slavery meeting was effected, and the person and life of Wm. 
Lloyd Garrison imminently endangered. And in September pre- 
ceding, the quiet of our own village was again interrupted by a 
mob, infuriated, and it would seem, "thirsting for the blood of an 
Fnglishman." We wisli not to recapitulate the transactions of that 
night of " wild uproar." Some of w?-, assembled at the hospitable 
mansion which was an object of attack for having sludtered the em- 
inent philanthropist from our falher-land, who was so obnoxious to 
those "sons of liberty," yet remember the oral demonstrations of 
the spirit that possessed them. Then it was that we learned how per- 
secution for righteousness' sake strengthens the hearts o| the perse- 
cuted — viz. by driving them for protertion an<l succor to the Al- 
mighty, whose name is a strong tower. And when the voice of 
supplication went up from among us for the outcast pleader for the 
oppressed, and in our own behalf, we felt that we were safe, — that 
they who were for us were more than they who were against ns. — 
Never saw we more clearly on which side we were arrayed. God 
grant us to be steadfast, immoveable, always abounding in His 
work. 

In November ensuing, George Thompson was driven from our 
shores, his friends judging that his longer stay here were at tlie 
imminent peril of hi.s life. " Yet his only crime was that lie dared 
to speak in i)ehalf of the American Slave! Posterity will wonder 
at this. We of the present day, see in it an added inf^entive to 
exertion, lest the slumber wliich has come over the .American mind 
should end in moral death. 

4 



26 

The year 1836 opened new and glorious prospects to the friends 
of freedom. True, the contest was mightier, but success was on 
the side of right. The enemy raged, but as if he knew he had but 
a short time. Agents, lecturers and societies were multiplied — 
light and truth poured in upon the people, and many great and hon- 
est minds yielded to their convincing influences. Congress was 
besieged with petitions for the abolition of slavery in the District 
of Columbia, which petitions we had assisted in circulating. They 
would not listen — 

" The prayer 
Of thousands, tens of thousands, was cast 
Unheard beneath tlie speaker's chttir : — " 

but they talked upon the subject, it was all we expected — it was a 
point gained. 

In March, abolitionists were permitted to plead before the Legis- 
lature of Massachusetts, and the cause was honored in the hearing 
of the representatives of the honest yeomanry, who have since come 
out so nobly in its support. Several interesting slave cases were 
tried during the summer at the courts in Boston, and the decision 
ultimately given by Chief Justice Shaw, that, by the law of Massa- 
chusetts, a slave if brought into the state by his master or mistress^ 
is free. This resuscitation of a long buried law was effected by 
means of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, and the first re- 
cipient of its benefits was an interesting child, called in the dialect 
of slavery, Med, who by request of one of the ladies who was most 
active in bringing the case into notice, was named Maria Som- 
mersett. Thus released from the mind-crushing grasp of slavery, 
she is now at the Samaritan Asylum for colored orphans, an insti- 
tution established by the same society, where she is enjoying the 
blessings of instruction, in a region of light and freedom. For an 
account of this trial, see the pamphlet entitled " Case of the slave 
child Med," containing the eloquent plea in her behalf, of Ellis 
Gray Loring, Esq., an ardent friend of humanity and human 
rights.* 

The Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society has a foremost rank 
in this great moral contest. Were not their trials, dangers and re- 
sponsibilities proportionate, their ability and opportunity for action 
would place them in an enviable point of view. But if our sphere 
of duty is more limited — if ours is a less conspicuous part — if our 
means of doing good are less abundant — we may remember for our 
consolation that it is the acting well the part assigned, however 
humble, and making the most diligent use of the talent or talents 
entrusted, that ensure the " Well done, good and faithful." 

The Conventions in 1836 were well attended and marked by 
unanimity, decision and Christian zeal. With hearts beating high 
for holy freedom, they pledged themselves, in the language of one 
of their resolutions, " to one another — to the oppressor and the op- 
pressed — to our country and our God — that, undeterred by threats 

* In a letter to the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society on this subject, Mr. Loring 
remarks, «' It is a very interesting consideration, that a decision not exceeded in inter- 
est or real moment by any decision made witliin the last half century, should be ob- 
tained through female agency. It ought to be a strong argument with the females of 
our land to unite in societies, gathering, as tliey mav from union, a moral strength ad- 
equate to such in>portant results." 



21 

of 'prosecution at common law,' whether in the messages of our 
Governors, the pages of our theological reviews, or the reports of 
Legislative Committees, come what may — gag law or lynch law — 
we will never cease from the exercise, full, free and undiminished, 
of the right of free (linnissio/i, till the last fetter shall be broken, 
and slavery and prejudice shall be buried in one connnon grave." — 
This was and continues to be the solemn, determined resolution of 
abolitionists. One of them has sealed his testimony with his blood, 
and thousands more are as steadfast hearted, if not ready to be 
offered. 

Our efforts were continued through that year as usual. We saw 
comparatively little fruit of our labors, but we knew we were aid- 
ing the great cause which must ultimately triumph, and we patiently 
toiled on. Again we exerted ourselves to circulate petitions. Our 
correspondence was extended. We contributed fifty dollars to aid 
the Herald of Freedom. On the last week in December, the Rev. 
J. T. Woodbury, whom wc had invited to deliver our Annual Ad- 
dress, gave a series of lectures in tlie South Church Vestry, calcu- 
lated for "reproof, exhortation, and instruction" in the doctrines of 
abolition. The cause promised to be greatly promoted by a mission 
to the West Indies, undertaken by Messrs. Kimball and Thome, un- 
der the direction of the American Anti-Slavery Society. The result 
of their labors is soon to be forth-coming in a volume, which will 
form a valuable accession to the list of Anti-Slavery publications. 
We were encouraged by the astonishing progress of the cause 
throughout our country, and entered upon the year 18437, with re- 
newed faith, and hope and zeal. 

This year has been distinguished by more strenuous efforts on 
the part both of the friends and opponents of emancipation. The 
nation is rocked to its centre. The alarm was early sounded through 
the country that a plan was in contemplation for the annexation of 
Texas to the Union, thereby augmenting slave-holding territory, 
wealth and power. The friends of the slave were on the alert. It 
seemed that a crisis had come, which must be met with vigilant, 
inflexible and persevering effort. And men have been raised for 
the exigency. Champions have arisen to assert and maintain the 
rights which are threatened t<j be wro.^tcd from American citiy-ens. 
The names of William Fj. Chainiing and John Quincy A«lams, 
will stand out in bright and bold relief on this dark page of our 
country's history. Petitions and remonstrances arc again being 
crowded upon Congress, and they must be heard. It is the last 
hope — we were about to say, of the slave and the free in this guilty, 
degraded land. But no ! 

" Wc have no Iiopc in Plmraoli — 
Much in God — inucli in the Rock of Ages.'' 

The Legislatures of Vermont and Massachusetts have taken po- 
sitions honorable to them as representatives of irce and enlightened 
States. Again the legislative hall in Boston has echoed the sound 
of eloquent advocacy- of the rights of iran and tiie expediency no 
less than the justice of iunncdiate abolition. * 

The month of May, the great Anniversary season at New York, 
was rendered memorable by the Female Anti-Slavery Convention of 

*By II. B. StanCon. 



28 

Delegates assembled iioin New-llampshiie, Massachusetts, Rhode 
IslaiKJ, New-Yoik, New-Jersey. Pennsylvania, Ohio and South Car- 
olina ; three of whom were from our Society. The object of this 
convention was " to interest women in the subject of Anti-Slavery, 
and establish a system of operations throughout every town and 
village in the free States, that would exert a powerful inlluence in 
favor of the abolition of American Slavery." The proceedings 
were honorable to the distinguished ladies who were active in its de- 
liberations. Intent on the high and holy object which had called them 
from their families and firesides, they pursued it with dignity, abili- 
ty and unwavering trust in Ilim in whose name they were met to- 
gether, that He would bless their efforts in behalf of His down- 
trodden poor, who have no earthly helper. 

The publications, six in number, issued by this Convention, were 
■calculated to inspire our hopes, and afford much aid to the cause, 
especially the " Appeal to the women of the nominally ^xgo States," 
which we wish every one of those women might read. Our Society 
paid ten dollars to assist in defraying the expenses of these publica- 
tions, and received a share of them for distribution. 

The New-Hampshire Anti-Slavery Convention brought together 
a goodly number of true-hearted friends to the cause, among whom 
were the well known J. G. Birney and William Goodell, the practi- 
cal " Philanthropist " and devoted " Friend of Man." We were 
streno-thened anew. The annexation of Texas was the prevailing 
subject before the meeting, and the necessity was urged of taking 
immediate measures to circulate remonstrances for presentation to 
Congress at its extra session in September. Accordingly a special 
meeting of our Society was called, in which it was unanimously 
voted that we should take on ourselves the responsibility of circu- 
lating such remonstrances in every part of our State. A committee 
was appointed for this purpose, who, as far as practicable, were 
faithful to their trust ; and returns from many of the towns showed 
that our endeavors were seconded by true, though in many instances 
(to us) unknown friends of the slave. They have their reward. 

One delightful circumstance in relation to our cause, we would 
mention with grateful emotion. It is the interest which is felt in it 
by the young. A cheering demonstration of this was the assem- 
bling of the Young Men's Convention in this town in August. — 
True to the principles in which they had been nurtured, they came 
with full purpose of heart, in all the warmth of youthful feeling, to 
engage in the cause of " holy and impartial liberty, "an<l to retrieve 
the character of our State. Scorning to be slaves themselves, and 
animated with the generous ardor of patriotism, they were indig- 
nant that any of their fellow citizens should under the waving ban- 
ner of freedom, be held in ignominious bondage. The love of 
God and man was glowing in their bosoms, and they had learned 
the sublime precept, " Whatsoever ye would that men should do to 
you, do ye even so to them." They came ready prepared and 
nerved for the conflict, and to consecrate their energies on free- 
dom's altar, 

" Not unto battle and to l)loo(l, 

Not girt and panoplied with steel, 
But to tlie strife of heart with heart, 

And armed with christian faith and zeal.' 



20 

Many of them were from the halls of Dartmouth, //(;//• iho nursery 
of free minds, which arc one day, we trust, to l^ccomc 
" The prop and glory of oor Slate." 

' We also name with much pleasure, the Young Ladies' Society, 
recently formed in this town. Juvenile Societies, (one in this vil- 
lage,) have been formed in various parts of the free States, by which 
the sympathies of children become enlisted in favor of the slave. 

We have also been gladdened by the formation of several Fe- 
male Societies in New-Hampshire during the present year, two of 
which, those of Dunbarton and Durham, arc auxiliary to ours. — 
From the former we gratefully acknowledge that our treasury has 
received a supply of thirty dollars. 

The eftbrts of those devoted sisters, S. M. and A. E. Grimkc, 
who have so unremittingly labored in the cause of the oppressetl 
the past season, have been abundantly blessed in stopping the 
mouths of gainsayers, carrying conviction to doubting minds, and 
enlightening those who were willing to receive the truth. We had 
hoped to be cheered and helped by a visit from them at this time, 
but the prostration of health induced by their excessive labors has 
prevented. God grant them speedy restoration ! 

The attempts to effect a division in the Anti-Slavery ranks, when 
the crisis has demanded a firmer concentration of effort, has grieved 
our hearts. We pray that all devices tending to interrupt the har- 
mony of abolitionists and weaken their confidence in one another, 
may come to nought ; that the spirit of love and forgiveness may 
animate all ; and that single-heartedness in aim and object, the love 
of God and man, may characterize every professed friend of the 
slave. 

Finally we have reason to thank God and take courage. Our 
cause is becoming as a mountain to fill the whole land. Probably 
the number of Anti-Slavery Societies in the United States, is now as 
many as 13 or 1400. More than 100,000 persons petitioned Con- 
gress at its last regular session for the abolition of Slavery in the Dis- 
trict. This year the number will be far greater, and that of signers 
to the remonstrances against Texas, greater still. More than sixty 
presses are friendly to immediate emancipation, and with eight it is 
a paramount object. Our seminaries of learning arc becoming //tc 
institutions. Poetry, from some of the most powerful and gifted 
pens, is doing great things for the cause. The works of the late 
lamented Elizabeth M. Chandler, and of the living, talented Harriet 
Martineau, are helping it onward. Political men are drawn out 
upon this question. Ecclesiastical bodies are acting upon it. In 
fine, it is becoming the one-absorbing topic, and so will continue 
until the foul blot on the national escutcheon, the deadly consuming 
evil which is sapping the vitals of this republic, shall be forever 
removed. 

Our Society now numbers PiO, nine of whom are life mendicrs. 
Our records for the year show that we were pledged to the State 
Society for seventy-five dollars, moie than half of which has been 
paid, and enough remains in the treasury, with the contemplated 
avails of maiuifactured articles yet unsold, to nearly retleem the 
pledge. We have purchased 100 Anti-Slavery Almanacs. We 



30 

liavc concspoiuled with nearly every sister Society in the State.* 
Since the lorniation of our Society, we have reaped much benefit 
from correspondence with the Female Anti-Slavery Societies of Phil- 
adelphia, New York, Boston, Fall River, &c.; also with George 
Thompson, S. M. and A. E. Grimke and others. The blessing of 
God hati^een upon our humble exertions. It is a privilege to labor 
irr^hfs cause. It is a blessed thing to endeavor to wipe the tears of 
the oppressed, to raise up the bowed down, to comfort those that 
mourn, to speak peace to the troubled heart, to enlighten the dark- 
ened mind, to " remember tliose in bonds as bound with them." 

Yes ! they are yet in bonds — " our countrymen " are yet " in 
chains." The scourge, the whip are yet laid " on woman's shrink- 
ing flesh ! " Our work is not yet done. Those who were created 
but " a little lower than the angels," are sunken as far as slavery 
can sink them, below the beasts that perish. And does Almighty 
Justice yet permit it? Our work is not yet done. A little longer 
we must toil and pray and wait. Almighty forbearance yet delays. 
A space is given our nation to repent. 

We have also been admonished to be diligent by a fearful messen- 
ger. Death has been among us. Four of our number within the 
past three years have been called to render up their account.t 
Though it is not ours to enquire who of us may next be summon- 
ed, we may each ask her own heart, " Am I ready and prepared 
to meet the Lord at His coming? " " Am I finishing the work He 
has given me to do? " May we lay no flattering unction to our 
souls ! 

We are called to sympathize in the affliction of our beloved presi- 
dent, who, by deprivation of health, has long been hindered from 
occupying her wonted station in our meetings. May this "sickness" 
be " not unto death, but for the glory of God, that the Son of God 
may be glorified thereby." 

But ah ! the woes of Mrs. Lovejoy ! Who of us can eflfectually 
sympathize in her sorrow? Who but He who has promised to be 
the father of the fatherless, and the God of the widow, can pour the 
balm of consolation into her deeply wounded heart ? To Him we 
commend her, with Him we leave her, in full confidence that He 
will be her stay, her friend, her comforter, her all. 

In regard to the martyrdom of her noble hearted husband, for 
whom we mourn as for a " brother beloved," " whose blood crieth 
iVom the ground," we view it as a martyrdom, though many of us 
feel it a duty to bear solemn testimony against a resort to deadly 

* Several Societies have recently been fornicd, and it is probable the whole niimbei' 
in the Slate is between 12 and 20. 

t The first was Miss Hannah George, a young sister who was but a short time vvidi 
us. Mrs. Betsey Curtis, wife of Rev. Joiiatiian Curtis, of Pittsfield, and a devoted 
friend of the cause, and Mrs. Samuel Coffin of this town, were next taken from works 
Jo rewards. Mrs. Coffin was a directress in the Society, distinguished by her effi- 
ciency, her whole heartedness, lier zeal tempered with discretion, lier ardent piety, 
and lier readinc.='s to every good word and work. Long and deeply have we deplored 
our loss, though assured that it was their great gain. Mrs. Aaron A. Palmer, an ck- 
cellent woman and an active directress, died the past summer. 

"Sisters, ye arc gone belbre ns, And when the Lord sliall summon us, 

(jonc to join the faithful blest. Now mourning left behind. 

Where the wicked cease from troubling. May we, as faithful unto death. 

And the weary are at rest. As sure a welcome find!" 

MiLLMAN, alleicd. 



31 

weapons, even in defence of life. IVc can fnul no sanction to snrli 
a resort, either in the example or precepts of the Divine Master. 
We remember that IJc said, "His kingdom was not of this worhl, 
if it were, then would His servants fight." 

May His kingdom come, and His will be done, on rarth ns it is 
in heaven ! 

MARY CLARK, Corresponding Src'i/. 

December 25, 1837. 



% 



OBITUARY. 



Died, in this town, on Mondiiy evening, Feb. 12, Mrs. Lucia Anwe F.jH-ifr of 
George Kent, Esq. and daiigluer of the late Hon. Daniel Farrand,of Biulington, Vr., 
aged 39. 

Tliere are those, shining as lights in this dark and perverse world, whose rlinrnc 
ters it IS a delicate task t'aitiifidly to delineate. Their brightness and beamy are uni- 
versally admired, but the constituent purls of such rare combinations of moral and 
intellectual excellence, are seen only in tlio retired sanctuary of their intimate friend- 
ship. To those without this pale, truth seems exaggeration, and fidelity of de^criplion 
nothing less than high wrought panegyric, while the favored few may well complain 
of the poverty of language or the unskilful use of it, in any attempt to do those char- 
acters justice. 

These remarks are especially applicable to the lamented Mrs. Kent, whose decease 
it is our painful duty to announce. 

" Some angel guide our pen while we describe" 
or endeavor to sketch a faint outline of one of the beautiful and excellent of the earth. 
We feel that it is meet and right so to do, not only as a tribute, pour indeed, but the 
best we can offer, to the memory of one we fondly loved, but as a picture for the living 
to look upon and transcribe into their own lives and diameters. We cannot speak 
of her but in tejras of praise, yet her image seems to rise up before us, as if, in the 
humility of her gentle spirit, to rebuke such commendation. 15y the grace of (Jod she 
was what she was. Any merit, except through Him who wrought in lier both to will 
and to do, we must in her name utterly disclaim. To Him be thank.-giving and praise, 
that a spirit so noble, so pure, so lovely, such an "emanation of the all-beauteous 
Mind," has dwelt among us, — thus privileged as living witnesses of her bright and 
winning example. 

As a wife, a mother, a sister and a friend, she was a pattern to those who sui^tain 
these endearing relations. Her " well-ordered home" was the homo of afleciion, 
urbanity and hospitality — the delight of her husband, her childien, her fuiiily aiirl 
friends. Her household was governed by the law of kindness. Few have more faith- 
fully regarded the divine connnand, " Tlieref(jre shall yc lay up these my wurds in your 
heart and in your soul, — and ye shall teach tlicn> your children, speaking of tlicm when 
thou sittest in thy house, and when thou walkust by the way, when thou best down, and 
when thou risest up." 

Her mind was clear, vigorous, active and discriminating. She thought, reflected, 
decided, acted for herself. What is truth ? and whatis(luly? were her first and 
constant inquiries, and so far as ascertained, were undeviatingly adhered to. Hence 
conscientiousness was a prominent feature of her character. With her there was no 
compromise of principle. She asked not what the world would say or thiidv,but," Is 
it right ■?" " Does God require it '?" 

Her piety partook of the character of her mind. It was deep, strong, ardent. It 
was not put on as a garment for particular occasions, it was blended with the inmo.^t 
feelings of her soul — it was infused into the tliou<jliis and purposes of her heart. Her 
works evinced that her faith was a living principle. She labored and prayed for the 
advancement of the Redeemer's kingdom upon earth, for its coming in ihe hearts of 
men. And while she mourned that the standard of holiness was no more elevated in 
tlie church, the signs of the times caused her to rejoice in hope of things to be. In this 
connection we may name, that when her flesh and heart failed, God was her sirenglli 
and portion. From no other source could proceed lh.it ciuict jiaiicuce, that meek 



32 

resignation, which eiinblod her amidst the most exquisite siiflerings, to sny, " Thy will 
be done." Hers was an early dedication. 

" She ranie to llit; cross wlien her young cheek was blooming, 

Ami raised In the Lnril the liright glanre ol' her eye ; 
Anil when o'er its liennty death's darkness was glooming, 

The cross did uphold lier, the Savicuir was nigh." 

She possessed an innate delicacy and refinement, cherished by a judicious educa- 
tion, whence proceeded 

" Tlie thousand decencies that daily tlovved 
Through all her words and actions." 

These, united with an engaging simplicity and frankness, a sweet and aftectionate di.s 
position, imparted grace to her manner and a charm to her enlivening conversation. 
Cheerfulness without levity, politeness without flattery, sincerity without rudeness, 
humility without meanness, self respect without vanity, decision and firmne.^s without 
obstinacy, and a remarkable though becoming energy and perseverance, all ciiaraclcr- 
ized our departed sister. But perhaps her most distinguishing trait was philantiiropy. 
This was unbounded. It expanded her whole soul. Her whole life was a labor ol 
benevolence — a practical illustration of the truth that those who love God, love their 
brother also. Her heart was the abode of that charity that " thinketh no evil," and 
hasteth to relieve the distressed. The poor, the sick, the sorrowing, the tempted, 
were sure to find in her a sympathizing friend and helper. The grateful te;irs and 
acknowledgments of the many who have been relieved by her bounty, comforted by 
her sympathy, and restrained by her admonitions, are full in testimony. 

She engaged ardently in most of the religious and benevolent enterprises of the day, 
but in none more devotedly than the cause of the poor slave. The horrid system which 
crushes the minds, rends the hearts and tortures the bodies of its hopele.ss victims, was 
to her " rigliteons soul" an object of the deepest abhorrence, increasing with the 
increasing knowledge of its enormities. Nothing in her view could ofl^er for it the 
least palliation. No excuse, however plausible, could to her mind justify its continu- 
ance a single day. To promote its abolition, she gave much time, labor and pecuniary 
aid. To obey, with reference to her enslaved brethren and sisters, the command of 
the Saviour, "Whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, that do ye unto 
them," and to " Remember those in bonds as bound with them," was the study of her 
mind and heart. It was to her a matter of solemn and deep lamentation that many of 
those who minister at the altar should not more faithfidly press home to the souls under 
their charge, these plain and positive duties. Such, in her view, were keeping back 
the counsel of God from those souls, for whose neglect of duty they must incur the 
responsibility. 

How eloquently she " opened her mouth for the dumb, and pleaded the cause of the 
poor and needy,"" on the side of whose o|)prcssors there was power," we who were 
iier humble coadjutors, have often admiringly witnessed. She was one of the earliest 
abolitionists in New-Hampshire, and took an active part in gathering a Female Anti- 
Slavery Society in this town. She viewed the cause of emancipation as the cause of 
CJod, and she was willing to suffer scorn, contumely, and reproach, with those who had 
openly espou.sed it. Her firmness on several trying occasions, especially in the strug- 
gle of the society for existence, when to be an abolitionist called for the exercise of 
faith and fortitude, showed that her attachment to the cause \vas the result of calm 
and deliberate conviction. This was strikingly manifested at the time when her hos- 
pitable dwelling was attacked by an infuriate mob, for being supposed to contain the 
distinguished English abolitionist, who, on account of his unrivalled eloquence and his 
burning zeal in the cause of humanity, had been invited by the brethren on this side tlie 
Atlantic to come over and help them. Alone, unshielded, undefended, save by the 
invisible armor of God, she undauntedly went out before the mob, inquired their 
errand, and assured them that he whom they sought, was not there. Well might they 
shrink back abashed, and turn away from such a presence ! 

Over the Society above named, she has presided from the time of its organization, 
directing, cheering, aiding and leading us onward in tliis untried path of duty, this un- 
proved work. She has lieen with us in seasons of joy and of sorrow, of strength and of 
weakness, of hope and of fear. We have rejoiced and we have wept togetlier. We 
have met with her in the social circle and at the footstool of Divine Mercy. We have 
mingled our prayers and our praises. Siie is taken and we are left. She is gone, but 
she has bequeathed us the rich h^gacy of her precious example, to induce our steadfastness 
in the holy cause; to teach us. instead of giving over our exertions and relaxing in our 
diligence, to labor more abundantly. She is gone to join " the cloud of witnesses" 
with which " we are compassed about;" "wherefore, let us Lay aside every weight and 
the sin which does so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set 
lieforc us; looking unto .lesus, the author and finisher of our faith, who, for the joy that 
was set before him, endured the cross, despised the shame, and is set. down at the right 
hand of God." a.'- -» "^ f\ <"-, i '^ 



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